One good reason to move to Hamilton

Thousands of tickets have been issued and hundreds of cars have been impounded as Hamilton police's Brat Pack rained on the boy racers' parade along Te Rapa Straight.

Figures obtained by the Waikato Times show in the 12 months to June 2008, police performed 9837 compulsory and mobile breath tests and took 97 positive readings; 3359 infringement and traffic notices were issued; 166 people were arrested for various offences; 143 vehicles were seized; and 362 vehicles were either green or pink stickered.

At the time, police labelled the work "very productive".

Waikato road policing manager Inspector Leo Tooman said the five-officer-strong Brat Pack had made significant progress with the boy racer problem in Hamilton.

"Te Rapa Rd used to be a bloody nightmare because they used Scotsman Grandstands along the service lane which has since been shut down. Then the liquor ban came in. Now it's really as soon as we see them starting to congregate you go and move them on."

However, businesses along Te Rapa Straight have a different view.

Washworld has been a popular congregating site for boy racers over the years, with varying amounts of broken bottles, spew and urine left decorating the premises.

Mr Olsen said there were occasional nights where it was worse than normal, but there were "very occasional" nights when nothing happened at all.

He said his staff would spend, on average, an hour cleaning up the mess left behind by boy racers.

He was disappointed there had not been as much presence of police in Te Rapa as had been promised.

"There's a liquor ban but it doesn't seem to have any affect.

"The police have done a bit of blitz and enforced it once in a blue moon. If it was enforced and there was enough of a police presence then we wouldn't be picking all the RTD bottles and other junk up."

He had noticed several congregation areas including Bunnings, Westpac and Fairview Motors and Shell Pukete car parks.

"It's gone on for a lot of years and a lot of talk on what's going to happen. It flares up and police do a bit of extra activity, something like the liquor ban; it hasn't solved the issue, it still carries on. It's just something that we pretty much deal with."

Shell Pukete manager Pierre Erasmus said staff spent every Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning picking up rubbish, broken bottles and McDonald's wrappers along with cleaning urine and graffiti off parts of the building.

"If they weren't so messy it wouldn't be a problem."

Waikato police spokesman Andrew McAlley said for a city the size of Hamilton police would never be able to remove all boy racers, but confirmed police were pleased there were no longer congregations of up to 2000 at a time as was the case about two years ago.